Consumers commonly enjoy the convenience of packaged food products such as dough products. In particular, raw dough products have gained commercial success as provided in frozen or refrigerated forms to facilitate consumers making home-baked dough products. Moreover, such raw dough products are typically packaged to facilitate consumer use, as desired. Potential consumers of such refrigerated or frozen dough products include individual in-home consumers, as well as in-store bakeries and restaurants that bake cookies on-site and sell the cookies to consumers at the bakery or restaurant.
Many dough products suitable for packaging as frozen or refrigerated products have been developed. As an example, sweet dough products such as certain types of cookies are frequently packaged in frozen or refrigerated forms. More recently, these frozen or refrigerated cookie dough products designed for home consumers have been provided as a separable block, where the consumer must first separate the individual portions of the block prior to baking. Another format for home consumer frozen or refrigerated cookie dough products provides individual cookie pucks, or preformed cookies, that the consumer simply transfers from the packaging to a baking pan for baking at the appropriate temperature. According to this latter format, no manipulation of the dough product is required by the consumer.
One type of dough used to produce cookies is a comparatively stiff, dry and crumbly dough of the type which when baked produces relatively hard cookies (for example, animal cookies and the typically round wafers that are often made into cookie sandwiches by placing a layer of frosting or confection between a pair of them). This type of baking dough typically lends itself to rotary molding devices, as it can easily be compressed into relatively shallow configured cavities in the rotary die, the cavity design and hardness of dough contributing to a clean complete release from such cavities subsequent to shaping.
Another type of dough used to produce cookies is “soft” dough, from which softer baked goods are made, in particular the soft type of cookies regarded as being more like homemade cookies. Such soft dough is considerably more flowable, as well as more sticky than the drier dough discussed above. Further, such soft doughs may not pack in the same sense as the drier cookie doughs and are thus much more difficult to force into the configured die cavities and the like of a rotary molding device so as to completely fill them. Such soft doughs are typically more suitable for wirecut processes of manufacturing. The soft cookie dough is generally characterized by comparatively high sugar and high shortening content, typically in the range of 50-70 baker's percent or more, for each ingredient. Generally, soft cookie doughs possess adequate cohesiveness to hold together, yet yield clean separations of the individual dough pieces as the individual dough pieces are cut by a conventional wirecut apparatus.
Today's health-conscious consumers wish to reduce their consumption of sugar, and particularly sucrose, for a number of reasons, including reduction of calorie intake. For this reason, sugar substitutes, sometimes called high potency sweeteners, have been developed. Sugar substitutes may be very effective for use in certain food products, such as soft drinks and the like. The direct substitution of sugar with high potency sweeteners in other products, such as baked goods, is more problematic. Sugar plays a number of roles in the overall flavor and texture and appearance properties of food products in addition to simply providing a sweet taste.